Why "Politics On Facebook" Is So Stupid

What is the safety record of new oil pipelines, as compared to older pipelines or rail transport? What states or cities have experimented with vouchers or charter schools (or other implementations of school choice), and what kinds of results have they seen? What new trends in “health outcomes” have we seen in the past few years (thus plausibly attributable to Obamacare), and which of these trends do you predict will be reversed if we repeal it? How many terrorism deaths have been caused by terrorists from countries on Trump’s travel ban list? If that’s an unreasonable sample to extrapolate from, what has changed recently to invalidate this history? And what is the expected amount of terrorism, however quantified (# of terrorism deaths? # of non-lethal incidents?), that the travel ban saves us from?

My major gripe with “politics on Facebook” isn’t that it happens. My complaint that it’s done so poorly. Information that would be relevant to the discussion is never offered. This is uncharitable, but my guess is that the people choking my news feed with self-flattering moral outrage memes don’t even consider that the empirical record might change their minds, or that future events might contradict them. Don’t for a second believe that pure moral outrage can answer all the important questions for you.

There are two very good reasons to think through these annoying empirical questions. The first is that you otherwise have no way of communicating with people who disagree with you. Consider this exchange:

Standing Rock supporter: “It’s imperative that we respect the land of a Native American tribe! The pipeline threatens their water supply, and at any rate their sovereignty should be respected whatever their reasons for saying ‘No.’”  

DAPL supporter: “No, it’s imperative that we respect the rule of law! DAPL followed it, acquired all the necessary land easements and approvals from all the right government agencies, etc. The pipeline doesn’t cross the Dakota Sioux’s territory and poses essentially zero threat to their water supply.” 

Both people in this discussion think they hold a moral trump card, but what really needs to happen is some quantification of the risk posed to the Dakota Sioux tribe’s water supply. Someone arguing on the side of the Dakota Sioux can do so more effectively if they have this information and can contradict claims made by supporters of the pipeline (claims which are empirical in nature).

The second (and far more important) reason to think these things through is that you’re probably wrong at least half the time. You should have some mechanism for determining when you’re wrong. If you observe the world through a lens of pure moral outrage, you have no such mechanism. You are basically allowing your emotions to pick an answer that in reality depends on facts and data. You might as well flip a coin. You aren’t just researching the facts so you can shut the mouth on that snarky conservative/libertarian/progressive on your Facebook feed (or passive-aggressively post the reply on your own page hoping s/he will see it). You’re doing the research so you can learn when your critics are right. And sometimes they are. Sometimes you are the snarky idiot on your Facebook feed. You need to adopt habits that allow you to identify when this is the case. 

I see the occasional plea for all "politics on Facebook" to stop completely. I don't want that. Bad policy really does hurt people, and that harm needs to be aired and examined in public view. Some people will smile to your face and be a decent person to you, but then will enter a booth and bubble in a circle every 2 years that says, "Steal my neighbors money and beat them up if they do things I don't approve of." These folks do need to understand that they are hurting people. There is a legitimate counterpoint to your worldview. There is a counter-claimant to every claim (someone has to pay, right?). There are opposing interests that need to be traded off against each other, and ultimately a winner needs to be picked and a decision made. Advances in information technology have allowed this conversation to happen. Unfortunately, there has been no such advance in emotional technology. We are still using our stone-age tribal brains to sort and interpret the incoming flood of information. We can do better, but it takes effort. 

“Money In Politics” Is a Massively Exaggerated Problem

My congressional representative, Aaron Schock of Illinois’s 18^th district, left office in disgrace. What exactly did he do? Did he take home big laundry bags with dollar signs on them, filled to the brim with cash, in exchange for voting a certain way on a certain bill? Not really. He allowed an interior decorator to lavishly redecotrate his congressional offices. An unseemly indulgence, for sure, but if this was a “bribe” it’s not like he was taking it to the bank.

Do read the Wikipedia entry, particularly the “Use of funds and resignation” section. He did other stuff and most likely misused campaign funds. But this has little to do with “money in politics.” For one thing, once a donor gives a politician money, it’s hardly the donor’s fault if the politician misuses it. It would be unfair to accuse Schock’s donors of bribery because their money was spent unethically. For another thing, he was caught and it brought down his career. Now, there were also reports (not in the Wikipedia entry) that he has been overpaid for the sale of his home, which sounds like a possible bribe. But once again 1) he was caught and reviled for it and 2) this at least shows that massive tit-for-tat cash payments are probably not happening.

When I lived in Ohio, then-governor Bob Taft was under fire for similar unseemly behavior. Once again, though, it wasn’t the “taking home massive piles of cash” type of bribery. Rather, he was brought down for failing to disclose gifts such as golf outings.

In addition to the criminal sanctions, Taft was issued a public reprimand by the Ohio Supreme Court on December 27, 2006 for accepting and failing to report gifts and golf outings worth more than $6000.00. This reprimand was attached to Taft's license to practice law in Ohio.

So maybe there are back-room deals where lobbyists are directly buying votes with briefcases full of cash, but I doubt it.

 Another relevant case is that of my other former governor, Rod Blagojevich, who famously tried to “sell” president Obama’s Senate seat after Obama was elected president. From the link:

 Fraud involving the appointment of a senator to fill the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama is the most notable charge against Blagojevich. Blagojevich was overheard on a recorded phone call saying "I've got this thing, and it's f**king golden. I'm just not giving it up for f**king nothing." He was also recorded as saying, "it's a f**king valuable thing, you just don't give it away for nothing", and that "If I don't get what I want ... I'll just take the Senate seat myself."
 Blagojevich allegedly sought the following in exchange for an appointment:
 -A substantial salary for himself at either a non-profit foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions.
-Placing his wife on paid corporate boards where he speculated she might garner as much as $150,000 a year.
-Promises of campaign funds—including cash up front.
-A Cabinet post or ambassadorship for himself to Serbia.

 In this case, he was arranging to take some of his money to the bank. He wasn't just asking for campaign funds as a quid pro quo (though that was one of several items). If he'd gotten his way he would have enriched himself in a way that effected his take-home pay. But a few things to bear in mind. 1) He didn't simply ask for a cash payment that he could take to the bank. 2) He apparently had to ask for these kick-backs; they weren't simply offered to him. He had to negotiate to get them. 3) This kind of stuff happens all the time. Politicians leave their elected posts and join private organizations that offer them lucrative salaries. Perhaps the politician joins a company and helps it to comply with the complex morass of regulations that the politician previously signed into law. Or perhaps the politician join a "non-profit" that s/he previously allocated public funds to and "earns" a healthy six-figure salary. Maybe this is my own mistaken impression, but I assumed this kind of stuff was going on all over the place. These shady deals aren't usually done as explicit quid pro quos; that would be illegal. Nor can the organizations (who benefit from a politician's actions) offer him a generous cash payment (one that they take to the bank, not a campaign contribution); that would be too obvious. But there's a winking, nodding understanding that "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine." Blagojevich's sin was to make the quid pro quo explicit. What made his action a crime was to say out loud what should have stayed unspoken. And finally, as in the cases discussed above, his misdeeds brought him down.

Of course none of this is to say that there isn't a problem. It's just that the problem is different from the one that the "Too much money in politics!" people complain about. The real problem is that there is too much politics in money. The government has too much control over the private resources of its citizens, too many funds to allocate, too much regulatory power, and too many favors to grant. So you will sometimes see private interests try to curry favor with politicians or vice versa. But this problem is massively exaggerated and misstated. Some people seem to hold this paranoid view that every single vote is bought and paid for by rich interests, with a cabal of billionaire elites running the show in the background. I think you have to explain away a lot of stories like those above to justify this worldview. Maybe these are public show-trials to cover up the more pervasive and far more egregious cases of bribery that are happening all the time? I think you would have to posit some absurd conspiracy theory to make this case.

Edit: I forgot to mention the fact that campaign spending doesn't seem to have much effect on election outcomes. See the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics article on Campaign Finance here. Someone could read my post above and think I'm clueless for belittling the influence of campaign spending. "Sure, politicians aren't literally taking home big piles of bribe-money. But 'the rich' are still buying elections." Well, read the encyclopedia entry in the link. There just isn't all that much campaign spending, and what spending there is doesn't affect election outcomes all that much.

Someone might also think I'm missing the point by belittling the roundabout bribes offered to politicians after their political careers end. Isn't bribing someone with a lucrative bullshit job just as bad as offering them a pile of cash for a vote? My point is that this kind of bribery is very roundabout, and organizations that seek to offer such bribes have to be very careful. The Blagojevich example is instructive.

To the Fairest...

Mount Olympus could have been wealthier by one golden apple if only it had clearly-defined property rights. Instead it destroyed a civilization. 

In the story of the Apple of Discord, the goddess Eris throws a golden apple into the middle of a feast of the gods. Inscribed on the apple were the words “To the Fairest,” implying that it belonged to the most beautiful. This predictably triggered a big fight over who was, in fact, the fairest. The conflict ultimately resulted in the Trojan War.

Supposedly this is a parable about how a small conflict can escalate into a much larger one. I think it actually has a different moral: strict property rights can nip a much bigger conflict in the bud. If ownership of the apple had simply been assigned to someone, even at random or for reasons that don’t seem “fair”, the whole conflict could have been avoided. “Finders keepers” would have avoided the conflict. “Show of hands for who is the fairest” would have done it. Granted it’s a new piece of property and ownership of it was brought into question the moment it was found, the means of assigning ownership should be as clear as possible so that conflict is minimized. And once ownership is established, even if that assignment is initially somewhat capricious, it should be very difficult to call that ownership into question. Allowing open-ended appeals and endlessly revisiting the "justice" of the initial assignment is a recipe for eternal conflict. The occasional injustice of a misjudged beauty contest (or unjust assignment of property to the "wrong" party, in someone's estimation) needs to be traded off against the very high cost of seeking perfect justice, given that we can only approach but never quite reach that Platonic ideal.

This is relevant because today many people endorse stamping “to the fairest” on everything and opening up discussion of who should rightfully own what. I’m thinking of Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remark and Elizabeth Warren and others’ echoing of it. The idea of reparations for centuries-old misdeeds also come to mind. While it certainly makes sense to correct an injustice where one party obviously robbed another, it is less clear that we should “correct” for these social injustices in which there is no clear perpetrator and no obvious victim. A rich person probably got rich by selling an in-demand service to customers who paid willingly. It isn’t at all clear that such a person “took” more than “his fair share.” For the sake of predictability, each voluntary transaction should be seen as inherently legitimate. The transactors should not fear that their exchanges will be later reversed or called into question by third parties looking at statistical aggregates. While it’s sometimes necessary to call the ownership of something into question and adjudicate that dispute, it is very expensive. The resources wasted fighting over who owns what can easily exceed the value of the things in dispute. Property rights should be strong enough to deter theft but still avoid unnecessary conflicts over who owns what.

How costly is it to resolve a property dispute? Think about the proportion of a settlement or jury award that a lawyer takes when his client sues someone for damages. I don’t have good numbers, but it’s often half or more of the settlement. And that’s an *under*estimate of the total cost; you have to consider the lawyers of the losing team and the judge’s time and the wasted time of various witnesses if you are trying to tally up the true social cost. Or think about insurance, where the rules for approving a claim are pretty straightforward and stated clearly in policy language. Auto and Property loss ratios (the percent of premiums paid out when insurance customers make a claim) are around 60% on average, meaning roughly 40% of your premium is the expense of processing the money (the incoming premiums and the outgoing claims dollars), handling the claims, pricing the insurance, investigating fraud, and other expensive, labor-intensive things that insurance companies do. For another example, the deadweight loss of taxation in the United States is thought to be something like 30% of revenue (citation needed, but this 30% figure is what I find from some casual Googling); collect a trillion dollars and you destroy $300 billion in value. It’s expensive to live in an environment where ownership is constantly called into question and reassigned from one party to another. 

I'm sure some of you think I'm being obtuse and are saying, "Of course the gods are going to fight over who is most beautiful! They are vain. Downright narcissistic. Obviously the apple was going to trigger a status fight. It was never about the stupid golden apple anyway. Why would a god care about a chunk of gold?" And of course that's another lesson: avoid status fights. Especially when they are motivated by crass materialism. Petty squabbles about who has the most stuff are the crassest and most materialistic of all status fights. I'm sure the inequality-mongers imagine themselves on the side of the angels, but I see them as fomenting illegitimate class resentments, instigating conflict where none needs to occur, and positing mistaken (easily refutable!) causal explanations of social phenomena. 

A Post About Fight Club and Sample Bias

Imagine if Jack from the movie Fight Club were to lecture you about auto safety.

In the movie Fight Club, Ed Norton (aka Jack) is an actuary who investigates automobile crash scenes in order to estimate the auto manufacturer’s liability.*  Imagine such a person lecturing you about the dangers of driving. All of his most vivid experiences involve real-life car accidents, some of which involve significant carnage. He could probably go on for a very long time stringing together one anecdote after another. He could justify each rhetorical flourish with another example of a family being horribly maimed or killed. You might get skeptical and say something about how you can’t judge the risk of driving just by looking examples of fatal or near-fatal car crashes. That’s a biased sample, to say the least. Obviously you’d want to start with the full sample of all drivers or all car-trips, and estimate the risk of a bad accident as a proportion of this greater total. But by the time you've managed to express this idea, he shuts you down with another vivid anecdote from just the other day in which a family was burned alive in their "safe" automobile. Driving is safe, indeed!

But of course you would be right to ignore his bluster and consult the actuarial tables to quantify the true risk. Generalizing based on the most vivid possible examples is generally a bad idea. If you know that someone has been gathering and assembling the worst 1% or the worst 0.01% of examples of something (or however far out in the right tail you want to go), they will be a biased source of risk information.

Switch the topic to drug legalization. Enter law enforcement and substance abuse treatment personnel and anyone else who deals with society's problems. "You naive drug law reformer, you simply do not know all the horrors I have seen," they might start. And they go on to regale you with example after example, not realizing that the vast majority of the relevant sample is hidden from their view. Of course, people with substance abuse problems are most likely to attract the attention of law enforcement and medical personnel. If you want to know how to deal with specific bad outcomes, these would be good people to consult for their opinions. (Sometimes, sometimes not...I have heard some of these people show very bad judgment even here in their supposed domain of expertise). But if you are trying to determine optimal drug policy, you should have some sense of how the typical potential user response to the various risks and hazards of drugs. Your sample will contain the millions of people who dabble for a while and never develop a habit, or develop some kind of a "habit" but it never becomes a problem. Beware the problem of sample bias. It is lurking everywhere. A skilled demagogue, or even someone who is honest but oblivious, can really mislead you if you aren't careful.

All this is simply to point out the issue of sample bias. Forget for a moment that many of those overdoses, blood-borne pathogens, and other problems are themselves products of prohibition. That fact will also be hidden from the view of someone who simply looks at the screw-ups and tries to extrapolate from there. The non-problem users in his (the cop/E.R medic/social worker's) own world are hidden from his view; the non-problem users in the counterfactual world of rational drug policy are doubly hidden. These law enforcement or medical professionals could at least see some kind of survey evidence for the existence of the hidden population of non-problematic drug users. But they can't "see" how much better the problem-users fair in a counterfactual world where clean needles are freely available, drugs are cheaper and thus don't require property crimes to support a habit, and drugs are of pharmaceutical grade and known purity (thus leading to fewer poisonings). "Seeing" in this way requires the disciplined use of logic and statistics, and somebody who is blinded by vivid anecdotes won't be able to do it. Since I've discussed these issues in other posts, I won't rehash them all here. I just wanted to point out that sample bias isn't the only problem contributing to these folks' misunderstanding of the issue.

Scott Alexander makes a similar point about sample bias in this excellent post. No, you can't just pile a bunch of horrific anecdotes on top of each other. You have to know something about the base rate. You have to know how large a sample you are digging in to dredge up the bad outcomes.
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* He describes his work in the following excerpt: “Take the number of vehicles in the field, (A), and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, (C). A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.”
At this point in the movie you're supposed to imagine that the manufacturer is a cynical monster, a hulking avatar of capitalist excess and greed. But actually the formula is about the right criterion for issuing a recall. It might be prudent to make the cutoff "X times 1.5" or "X times 3" or something more conservative than simply "X", but there is no way that the value of X is completely irrelevant to the recall decision. Anyway, that's an argument for another post.

It’s Going to Be Okay

The sun will rise tomorrow. Buildings will not fall. You’ll get up, go to work, go back home to hang with your people, then go to bed again. A lot of stuff will happen that you can’t do anything to stop, but then that’s always true. We tend to put way too much thought into what government does and way too little into how to make our own lives better. Which is ridiculous considering that we have so little control over the former and so much control over the latter.

Do you want these next four years to not suck so bad? It’s not that hard. Be nicer to your spouse, kids, parents, and friends. Do more helpful chores around the house to take the load off of other people. Play with your kids more. Leave each day a little bit better than you found it.

Do the same at work. Hustle a little more. Learn a new skill, even a new career. Consider taking some online classes or doing some kind of professional exams to improve your resume a little. There are probably little things you can do that will pay off a little, and there are big things you can do that will pay off big. Find out what they are and do them.

Are you stretched too thin already? Maybe do the opposite of what I’m saying and give yourself a break. I certainly know people who go to both extremes, that of “too much” and of “too little” effort.

None of this is to say that bad government is irrelevant to the quality of your life. Governments can do horrible things that make your life miserable. My point is that it makes sense to allocate your attention and resources to the things that you have control over. There are things you have little or no control over, and sometimes these things make for interesting hobbies. I myself am a voracious reader on all things political, so if it sounds like I'm making "politics" into a vice then it's a vice I indulge to the hilt. I'm an infovore, and I enjoy the intellectual exercise of policy analysis. But I don't let it distract from the ways I can improve my own life. There are many levers to pull and dials to adjust that affect the quality of your life, and most of them are thoroughly under your control. 

How To Think About Government Regulation

Suppose a customer wants some kind of safety feature or quality assurance on a product they are buying. Say it’s a warning tone in an automobile, or a quality inspection on apples, or whatever else you can imagine. Suppose the customer is willing to pay up to $5 extra to add this feature. If the feature costs less than $5 to produce, the company will obviously add it to the product. If I can spend $2 on added quality and charge the customers an extra $5 per unit, that’s an extra $3 per unit I can pocket. (Or, more likely you’ll charge somewhere between $2 and $5 and share some of the surplus with the consumer. Anyway, re-write the example with whatever numbers you prefer.) On the other hand, if it costs more than $5 to produce the feature, the customers don’t really want it. They aren’t willing to pay the cost of production.

If you think this through, you start to realize that government regulation is gratuitous. If a regulation “forces” a company to produce something that the customer is already willing to pay for, that regulation is completely redundant. A free market will already supply that particular “regulation.” If a regulation forces a company to produce something that the customer is not willing to pay for, it’s actually doing harm. What this regulation is really doing is forcing the consumer to bear the cost of something they don’t actually want. If you impose an extra, say, $10 in production costs on something by adding a feature that the customer only values at $5, you’ve destroyed $5 in value per unit. You’ve harmed the consumer by $5 for each unit purchased.

This ignores “externalities,” or costs to third parties. The consumer might not want to purchase a $20 pollution-mitigating mechanism on their car even though the benefit to society is, say, $50, because the consumer only gets a tiny fraction of that benefit. Regulation of such "externalities" can in theory be justified because everyone wants everyone to have the pollution-mitigating device even though everyone is tempted to cheat by not buying his own. But my above discussion certainly applies to regulation that is meant to benefit the consumer directly. A safety inspection on the meat that I purchase directly benefits me; I don’t benefit third parties by assuring the safety of the food that I eat. There is no “pollution” effect on most of these kinds of safety/quality regulations. 

The above argument also applies to various labor regulations. If the cost of a safety practice (or safety equipment, or a comfortable amenity like climate control) is less than the value the worker places on it, then the employer will buy it for his workers. If your workers each value the additional safety at $100 per week and it only costs you $50 per worker-week to provide the safety, you would have to pay your workers an additional $100 to endure risks that you could mitigate for $50. Even if there is "market power" or something else going on here, there is clearly a deal to make and a surplus to share. (Here is a good treatment at Econlib.)

The point isn't to say that "no regulation is good" or "all regulation is pointless." That is close to my own position, but I won't try to sell that here. The point is rather that you should think more critically about some proposed piece of at-first-blush reasonable regulation. What is the cost? Why aren't consumers already demanding it ("demanding" implicitly meaning "being willing to pay the production costs")? Is there an obvious externality or market failure here? Is there really asymmetric information (in which a sophisticated company bamboozles low-information customers), or are customers actually indifferent to the information and thus ignore readily-obtainable information? Think about it. You might not get all the way to "There should be no government regulation at all." But plainly the stereotype of greedy corporations looking to slash safety and quality costs to earn a quick buck is a mistake. Slashing quality costs a corporation more than the cost savings if you think for a moment about the customer's willingness to pay. (I'm assuming here that actual fraud, selling something other than what you say you are selling, is illegal under any regulatory framework. Just as theft and murder are illegal under any regulatory framework. There are common law doctrines that exist basically everywhere and aren't a function of the regulatory state.)

Reacting to "Outrage Porn"

Emotionally reacting to individual news stories is kind of silly. Some news is useful. But the latest sob story about some horrific crime is not useful and it’s barely even information.

I like the term “outrage porn”, typically in reference to these outrageous news stories about individual crime cases (or sometimes outrageous non-crimes). I imagine this dialogue:

Person 1: Did you realize that a really horrible thing happened this week?

Person 2: Well, I guess I assumed that *something* horrible happened this week, considering that horrible things happen every single day. I don’t see why knowing about a specific instance would meaningfully add to my knowledge.

Person 1: Yeah, but did you see…THIS! (Horrible, outrageous headline.)

Person 2: WHAT! This is an outrage!

Person 1 + Person 2: Rabble rabble rabble!

Sometimes the news meaningfully informs you about your world. As far as I can tell these outrage stories do not. I think some people string together collections of these news stories, each one alone being merely an anecdote, and fool themselves into thinking they are incisively analyzing a real social trend. No, you need some statistics to do that, along with the competence to interpret those statistics. Take off the "moral outrage" hat for a moment and put on the "skeptical analyst" hat. It's rewarding in its own right, and it will help you communicate more meaningfully with people who hold opposing worldviews.